The brief and ebullient debut by 21-year old Mica Levy et al. is so tic-ridden and childlike, and so packed with dissonant non-chords and chirping calls of hand-clapped rhythm, you'd think a pack of kids had picked out the instruments and written the arrangements. In fact, Jewellery's regressive auditory freakout is part of its greater complexity.

Listen closely and you'll hear pastoral English twee, Carl Stalling cartoon music, bull-headed hardcore, early rock and roll, and nicks of contemporaries like Animal Collective and Hot Chip. And that's just the first track. The rest of the songs, produced by microhouse man Matthew Herbert, eagerly follow suit, like Pop Rocks in a stomach full of Coca-Cola, or caroming candy-coated pinballs.

Levy's unorthodox and, in some cases, homemade instruments strum and stutter with calculated abandon; her heavy British accent slumps itself across this glitchy bubblegum arcade and blunts it, as she sings of everything from premature scavengers and math problems to matters of the heart that need not be so intelligible.

Are Animal Collective a jam band? Like many white males in their early 30s with slowing metabolisms and dorkish concerns, I never really got what the big fucking deal was about Animal Collective. I was turned onto them years ago by a friend at an old workplace; he had better taste in music than me.

The future is now Even with all the promise of the new year ahead, it's hard not to feel a little stiffed in the Future of Mankind department. Here it is, 2010, and there's nary a flying car to be seen.

Is 2010 the Year of the Girl? Many have argued that the descriptor "indie music" means nothing more or less than "bands Pitchfork reviews" these days, and the claim was never more true than last year

Animal Collective | Fall Be Kind This nifty little five-track postscript to January's celebrated Merriweather Post Pavilion demonstrates further how adept the members of Animal Collective have become at deploying their bottomless bag of electro-psych tricks in the service of songs.

BROWN BIRD | FITS OF REASON | March 18, 2013 Brown Bird, a boundary-pushing Americana duo from Rhode Island, make music that touches upon that can't-put-my-finger-on-it amalgamation of past and future sounds.

NICK CAVE &AMP; THE BAD SEEDS | PUSH THE SKY AWAY | February 20, 2013 Much like the similarly low-key The Boatman's Call , Cave's highly anticipated 15th album with the Bad Seeds manages the puzzling feat of making a great band seem inconsequential, if not entirely absent.

SCOTT WALKER | BISH BOSCH | November 27, 2012 Scott Walker's late-period about-face is one of the strangest in the annals of pop music.